Clay said, “Each island could defend itself with fire. But also, two, three, or four islands could cross fire into open spaces between them. And each island could protect one or more of its neighbors with fire.”
Earl Seldon’s islands were designed to absorb the shock of the Schwerpunkt, the hard point. General Clay had held back units of the 1st Armored and 4th Motorized divisions from the beach front to form the AT pockets.
Clay said, “The islands acted like sponges, sucking the tanks in, absorbing them. Instead of breaking through a strongly defended line and then finding everything behind it easy traveling, the Wehrmacht was caught in withering crossfire wherever they turned.”
Corporal Jamie Shaw was harnessed into the driver’s seat of his Sherman, Cock of the Walk. His hands were wrapped around the track steering levers. His waxed paper bag was tucked into the top of his uniform blouse like a napkin to keep it at hand. It was half full. He was leaning forward, his eyes squinting at the direct vision visor, around which were stowed gas capes tied against the turret with lengths of leather cords.
“I was in fourth gear,” he told me after the war, “traveling about twenty miles an hour. My commander saw something and ordered me hard left, so I shoved in the left clutch pedal and pulled on the left track lever.”
At that instant, the entire tank chimed like a barrel hit with a hammer. A German AT shell coming in at too great an angle had wormed under the hull above the tread. The glancing blow fouled the left brake and gear box. Another would surely follow. The commander ordered Shaw left into a glade of wild rhododendrons.
“I yelled that I couldn’t turn that way. I had a runaway power train to the left side. So he ordered us right, anything to get out of the line of fire. I spun us around, and through the visor I could see a Panzerfaust crew lifting another pipe to the gunner’s shoulder. Three of them, the gunner and two mules.”
The Panzerfaust, a one-shot disposable unit resembling a plumber’s helper, was the best hand-held antitank weapon of the war, far outshining the American bazooka.
“We opened up with the turret and hull Brownings. Wiped them out just as they loosed the shot. Their round soared over us.”
Shaw’s Sherman was crossing an oat field, chased from the protection of a nearby thicket by Wehrmacht AT teams. The Sherman rolled into the middle of an enemy tank charge.
“We were all alone, boxed by three panzers. I was so afraid. I knew the Sherman was prone to catching fire. Tank crews called it the Ronson. I had nightmares about being brewed up.”
And Shaw was regurgitating. “Swaying, swerving, weaving, rolling, lurching up and down. God, I was sick. I threw up breakfast, dinner from the night before, an entire enlistment of mess hall food. At least, with our left side out, I had a free hand to hold the waxed bag to my mouth.”
I spoke with four Wehrmacht soldiers who witnessed Cock of the Walk during the next ten minutes, a panzer driver, two members of an AT team, and an ME 109 pilot, all of whom were trying their best to perform the coup de grâce on the lame Sherman. They described a berserk tank that raced, twisted, and crashed through anything and everything.
“Well,” Jamie Shaw said, “that about sums it up. I do remember busting through a nice picket fence, then through a tool shed, then turning right and going sideways through a barn. I was locked into fourth gear, and it was twenty miles an hour or nothing. And we went through a dog run, then smashed through the front porch of a house. All the while, I was vomiting up my lungs.”
Shaw’s memory is selective, and perhaps with his Sherman in and out of the enemy crosshairs every few seconds, it deserves to be. I have pieced together those runaway ten minutes during which Shaw’s Sherman dodged the increasingly impatient Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe. In addition to the collisions remembered by Shaw, Cock of the Walk ran over six telephone poles, destroyed a dozen apple trees, blew through a power substation, demolished five farm implements (a disk, binder, harrow, and two hay-balers, all of which belonged to farmer Felix Armstrong, who opined after the war that perhaps a German occupation would not have been so bad by comparison), crushed a goat shed, dug up a three-hundred-year-old cemetery, crumpled a Bedford truck, ripped out the newly constructed annex on the St. Bernard parish church, and burst through Edward Petrie’s shed, in which was stored a Panhard automobile, manufactured by the Daimler Company in 1895 and lovingly preserved by three generations of Petries.
Edward Petrie said later, “There was nothing left of my beloved Panhard larger than my fist, and knowing as I do how ungrateful colonials often feel about their mother country, I suspect that Sherman traveled back and forth over my Panhard three or four times.”
“I didn’t do any of that on purpose,” Jamie Shaw defended himself. “First, we were running for our lives, and second, I’d filled up my waxed bags, and my periscope and direct vision visor were covered with puke, and I couldn’t see too much. Plus, hot drops of oil from the breech were dropping down the back of my neck.”
Shaw went on, “Our gunner, Dinkie Welch, was a prodigy. I once saw him spit a horsefly out of the air. He was just as good at the gunsight.”
While Cock of the Walk crushed under tread much of southern England, Dinkie Welch repeatedly fired the Sherman’s 75mm gun. Shaw said, “Every time I straightened the tank out, he’d let loose another round. And one kill I’ll never forget. Our shell blew the panzer’s turret and the hull hatches straight into the air. When the turret came down, its gun barrel slammed into the open driver’s hatch. So the turret was stuck in the air far above the hull at the end of the long barrel. It reminded me of a child’s lollipop, sticking up there.”
The list of the Cock’s kills reads like a child’s math primer: five armored cars (four Mercedes Benzes and a Krupp command car), four panzers, three half-tracks (one Demag and two of unknown manufacture), two Marder self-propelled guns, and one Radschlepper (artillery tractor).
“If Dinkie could see it, he could bust it,” Shaw said.
Low on fuel and ammunition, Cock of the Walk then fled west. When Shaw needed to turn left, he had to spin the vehicle almost a full circle.
“From a hill, my squadron leader was able to watch the last half mile of our retreat, and when we climbed out of the tank, he demanded to know what I’d been drinking. And I was covered with vomit, which confirmed for him I’d been tipping the bottle inside the hull. It took me a while to convince him otherwise.”
But convince him Shaw did. Mechanics worked on Cock of the Walk for three hours, and away Shaw and his crew went again. “I had time to eat lunch, a Spam sandwich. It tasted better going down than it did coming up, which it did as soon as we were underway again.”
The stories I have told of the Battle of Haywards Heath are random samples. Similar incidents ranged over Sussex as far north as Crawley and as far south as the channel. Estimates are that over seven hundred German armored vehicles were engaged in the battle and almost five hundred Allied vehicles. The battle entered military history as one of the most ferocious armored engagements ever fought.
“Earl Seldon’s invention worked,” General Clay summarized. “We bloodied the panzers. I’m sure OKW was stunned by our resistance island tactic and by the extent of their losses.”
But by then, the German second wave was rolling into battle. Clay said, “They just kept coming, more and more of them. And they finally broke our back.”
Truly decisive battles are rare events. But by nightfall of the invasion’s second day, Allied defenders in Sussex had been overwhelmed. “To German commanders, it must have appeared that little now lay between them and London,” General Clay said. “And it sure as hell looked that way to me.”